


The Cost of Failure

by MaureenLycaon



Category: Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children
Genre: Angst, Originally Posted Elsewhere, Other, Short
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-26
Updated: 2020-01-26
Packaged: 2021-02-27 11:20:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 497
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22416169
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MaureenLycaon/pseuds/MaureenLycaon
Summary: Cloud angsts over his perceived failures.
Kudos: 1





	The Cost of Failure

**Author's Note:**

> (This was written some time in 2003 for a fanfic challenge inspired by the word "commensurate."
> 
> Copyright disclaimer: the movie Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children and its characters belong to Square Enix. Only the interpretation and these particular words belong to me, Maureen Lycaon. No copyright challenge intended.)

In the end, even the children aren't enough to assuage Cloud's guilt.

The church's footboards creak softly under his boots as he walks past the empty pews. Not for the first time, he wonders what it looked like when it was not abandoned, believers filling those pews, song and chant rising to the rafters. All hymns and rituals silenced, now and forever. The evening breeze blows through, coming in from the gaping holes in the walls.

He sits down cross-legged among the flowers that still spring up from the floorboards, and their sweet smell fills his nostrils. Under the faint starlight, their white blooms gleam like pyrite. He watches them sway in the faint breeze, his mind blank for a while.

Then grief fills him again, and with them the knowledge of futility, of his own uselessness.

He visits the grave the next day, where the great sword rusts.

 _I'm sorry, Zack,_ the words form in his brain without his conscious effort. He no longer bothers to speak them aloud.

Then he feels the pain in his left arm. He's been riding hard, working the delivery route, for the past two weeks, so he'd dismissed the growing ache as just muscle strain from being on Fenrir twelve hours a day. Now it's more like a sharp, burning jab.

The strange thing is, when he looks down at his bare arm and sees the new black sore there, his first feeling is _relief._

He goes to the clinic the following morning. It doesn't take long to confirm his sentence. He moves out of Seventh Heaven that day, into the church.

Thanks to his weakness, Zack died, then Aerith. He can't save the children. Still, now he can at least share their fate. At last, the full penalty of his failures will be paid.

 _Maybe there's justice in the world after all,_ he thinks that night as he spreads his sleeping blanket on the floorboards and lies down. Or, if not justice . . . at least balance. Payment.

It's enough to dull the pain.

He wears a cloth cover over the arm as the geostigma spreads up and down his arm. He hasn't earned the right to sympathy or pity, he knows. And he is too proud to want them anyway.

He fought long and hard against the pack of death claws, and in the end he won. Now their bodies lie scattered on the ground. Then the pain hits again -- all at once, as it often does these days, his left arm one mass of nearly unbearable ache. He clutches at it with his right hand, digging his fingers in until he bruises what whole skin remains, but he endures the agony without a murmur until it passes.

He wouldn't let the death claws kill him. He's not about to commit suicide to escape the slow months of spreading agony. His penalty will be commensurate with the depth of his failures. In this, at least, he will not fail again.


End file.
